"Sensuous details will acquire significance as they lead him to glimpse the emotional undercurrents that flow so swiftly beneath the surface of everyday life."
Rosenblatt's Ch. 2, "The Literary Experience," posits that the reader makes the text into something more than words on a page, that the individual experience to the poem or story gives it meaning, and that it's our task as teachers to foster fruitful interactions. I was thinking about this in regards to our conversation about classics--are there books that everyone should read, texts that hold universal meaning. The IRD had a defined list of classics (and even "near-classics"), texts which they had determined were irreplaceable and held potential to develop values and a larger social perspective for emergent readers, for every grade level, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. It even attempted to include marginalized voices and multicultural texts, so good for them, not bad for a corporate organization. It stressed the value of absorption, getting lost in a book, the way I did in second grade when I didn't hear the bell ring while reading in the library and consequently being late for class. Did the books I read make me examine my views on humanity? I dunno. Maybe subconsciously, yes.
"There are many experiences that we all have in common--birth, growth, love, death. We can communicate because of a common core of experience, even though there may be infinite personal variations." So maybe it's not that bad to suggest there are a few really great books that can speak to a lot of people. I'm not going to say everyone, but a lot.
Then I got to thinking about why we respond to the pieces we respond to, that tenuous hold that certain authors or themes or stories have on us, and why. My favorite books--Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (really anything by Hunter S. Thompson), The Virgin Suicides (really anything by Jeffrey Eugenides), Still Life with Woodpecker (really anything by Tom Robbins), Jazz (really anything by Toni Morrison), The Shining (anything by Stephen King). You get the picture. Clearly these authors' styles and the subject matter strike some kind of chord with me that when I read them, I have an intense emotional response. Their words and phrasing, their rythym, the broken conventions and violated textual norms all speak to me, as do the plots and settings and subject matter of these stories. That said, I assume these works were out of my emotional range when I was 8, or even 12, and I wouldn't have appreciated them the way I do now. When I was young, I was a big fan of Nancy Drew and other stories that I see now as more or less moral homilies that Rosenblatt warns about. Well, not really warns, but she draws attention to the difference between reading as pure art and reading in order to extrapolate social implications, and I imagine most pleasure reading necessarily falls somewhere in between, hopefully closer to the aesthetic side.
In regards to classroom practice, I was also disappointed when we'd take a trip to the library, and my students would either not show any enthusiasm or any clue about how to find a book they'd like. Some assumed no books held any kind of enjoyment for them. Some would check out the same books every time, usually about (for the boys, anyway) drugs, low riders, or rappers. Seriously. Those were self-selected books, and I didn't want to dissuade them from picking out their own books, but I constantly tried to develop an inquisitive mind--find something you don't much about and learn. Of course, part of the problem with no real grasp on the search process, part was a pervasive belief that books were boring, although some did find themselves following a particular series or author and got real pleasure from it. I liked Rosenblatt's quote on 39 about the escape value of literature--"anything that offers refreshment and a lessening of tension may have its value in helpng us to resume our practical lives with renewed vigor..." (I don't want to rewrite the whole paragraph, but it's a good one. For the troubled kiddos that I taught, the escape principle was definitely valid, as was the opportunity to sympathize/learn from other peoples in conflict--as I look back on the more successful lessons I had, the ones that spoke to and broke through to my kids, they were stories like The Diary of Anne Frank, The Monsters are Due on Maple Street, To Kill a Mockingbird, poems about love and family and heartbreak. They were texts that had within them a theme or emotion that the kids could relate to in some way as a basis for discussion. "Knowledge of literary forms is empty without an accompanying humanity."
No one can read a poem for us.
So this post is kind of scatter-brained, I realize, but I'm wondering at this point:
What stories do you feel strongly about, that you would encourage students to read, and why?
What kind of schema or game plan should we set up for "responsible reading," or should we send them out into the story on their own and let them make what they will of it?
What kind of questions and discussions will extend their meaning-making (keeping in mind the role of imaginative writing in response to text)?
One last thought--I liked how Rosenblatt suggests that the experience of reading produces some ultimately undefineable results and emotions, that there is something almost magical about the event that is different for every person. Also that to really get something from reading, the reader has to be imaginative and searching--how can we develop that creativity in our kids (especially when we hold them to such rigid standards and classroom structures)?
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